This isn't the case. PC Insider has an article interview with the lead on the D3 project, and he discusses the belief Blizzard has about ensuring that platform games are created from the ground up. They may share textures, sounds, etc, but the games will be developed separately.

Indeed, and the PC version has no awkward menu scrolling or any other signs of console "taint". The only thing in the beta that appears remniciscent of console games is considerably lower difficulty than par. However this is likely solely due to beta tuning.

With the tablet touch screen controller, Diablo 3 would be amazing, plus it could have graphics somewhat on par with the PC version. They gave the N64 Starcraft so anything is possible. Come on Nintendo drop a wad of cash off at Blizzard HQ.

I loved the first two Diablo games and spent endless hours playing them. However, there's a lot of questions that they never answer or keep changing their answer to. Will it be pay-to-play like their WoW model or will B.Net be free like previous games in the series? Will there be a single-player mode? Will you be able to play on private servers or will you be stuck with B.net?

If at least two of those three are not favorable then I probably won't be getting it.

It will almost certainly be free to play, but not as free to play as their previous games were. There will be no spawing copies for LAN play. I'm guessing that the money they need to maintain the servers will in large part come from the auction house and people buying new copies in the future.

It will be free to play, Valve makes a killing off the in game store in TF2....and the items you will probably be able to get in the game store for D3 will probably be more helpful than anything you can get in the Mann Co. store.is.

Will you be able to play on private servers or will you be stuck with B.net?

The B.net aspect of your post is interesting to me. With the exception of Sony's recent acceptance of Steam on the PS3, the consoles have been loathe to support a community system other than their own. For example, the XBox 360 never gives any indication that you are playing on anything other than XBox Live (aka XBL). Although, when playing many EA games you do have to at least link an EA account to your XBL gamer tag, so there does seem to be some connection, but everything about the interaction appears

Microsoft is definitely MUCH stricter about XBox Live integration for all games/apps on the 360 than, say, Sony with the PS3. They made a "partial" exception for EA because without it they'd be missing online play for the majority of console sports games, etc. I'd imagine after looking at the insane profits WoW has been making in recent years Microsoft would be willing to work with Blizzard on some sort of B.net support as well...

Blizzard is pretty PC-centric, so if anything it will be the console versions that will be shitty ports of the PC version, not the other way around.

That said, there's no reason why both versions can't be good. Torchlight was a Diablo clone made by an indie developer that was praised for the amount of work put into making the console port just as playable as the PC version. There's no reason why a big company like Blizzard couldn't do the same... other than greed and laziness, I guess.

But Torchlight was made by the people that made Diablo 1 and 2. Diablo 3 is created by a completely different team.

I found both Torchlight and the D3 beta totally awful.

Maybe I'm just outgrowing hack-n-slash, along with every other mainstream category. God knows I hate 95% of shooters these days.

I swear to god, I hate indie game hipsters just as much as indie music hipsters and Linux prophets, but I haven't played a good AAA game since New Vegas, whereas indies are putting out dozens of kickass titles per year.

God help me I'm becoming an elitist. Get me some non-ironic domestic beer and a copy of MW3, stat!

God help me I'm becoming an elitist. Get me some non-ironic domestic beer and a copy of MW3, stat!

Nah man, you're not becoming an elitist.

Mainstream games are constantly getting dumbed down and coming bundled with garbage like DRM and stuff that we don't want. We've finally reached the point in the gaming industry where a small team can put out a really good game. We don't have to buy the big budget stuff anymore, we have options and so we go for what we see as the superior product - the one that doesn't treat us like a criminal. The one that doesn't treat us like a child that can't understand a complex

I'm on the same boat... But I think there are other factors involved beyond hipsterism and age, though... Games these days are like movies these days, you have the big AAA blockbuster titles which are massive, expensive, and epic, but ultimately safe and shallow, and then you have a thriving indie market which spawns tons of terrible crap but also manages to come up with some really good (better than the AAA titles) experiences. For some reason the indie scene has completely exploded of late, probably th

Blizzard is long gone, the people who made it great no longer work there. It is now Blizz-ivision. Which isn't to say they cant produce good games, but you can no longer predict the game quality based on past efforts.

How long until Acitvision/Blizzard get enough money that their bank account collapses into a black hole, under it's own mass? Seriously, I'm sure Diablo 3, will be fun to play but the whole real money market place and lack of LAN/always on connection requirement really bothers me as a consumer. I think I'm going to pass on Diablo 3 myself, and just buy Torchlight 2 when it comes out.

What's the negative aspect of the auction house? From what I see there's one auction house that uses in-game gold and another that uses real currency, and as far as I can tell neither of them are required for a player to use.

Well, for one, it gives them an incentive to design the game and item drops to maximize trading at the (real money) auction house rather than making it the most fun. Not that they will likely do that from the outset, but the promise of getting a portion of all trade at the auction house can't help but be a driver as they tweak item drop rates - once they have that ability, at some point a manager is going to point out that they could extract $x from the community by just doing this or that minor tweak. Activision won't be able to help themselves, even if Blizzard resisted initially.

There are other arguments, but to me that is the main one. It gives them an incentive to tweak the game to drive profits rather than just make the best game they can.

What scares me is that it's another step on the road to the Zynga-ification of all games.

I don't mind DLC so much, at least that tends to be like mini-expansions, or even cheats. But what happens when the core items/content of a game become for-sale, where it is absolutely no longer adequate to simply buy the game in order to play it, but your enjoyment / ability to partake in the content is driven by how many dollars you put into the game?

Since there is a separation between the two AHs it means that anything worthwhile will be only available on the money AH and the regular AH will be littered with trash items that people are hoping to pawn off.

So to use D2 terms. You'd find mostly magic items and a few rares on the GoldAH. Sets and Uniques would only show on the RealMoneyAH. All runes and gems would show up there due to the conversion mechanic to upgrade. The low level stuff would be cheap as hell but with enough you can get the top end stuf

As the OP I'd like to acknowledge, before any lifelong Blizzard fanboy bawls me out, that sometimes the game masters, forum moderators, and community managers at Blizzard can be full of shit. If it was just that statement I quoted in support of a console release, I might be at least skeptical myself.

This story, however, has much more to it than just that final acknowledgment; from the directness of the reply, including naming the project lead, to the stuff in the extra links soulskill was kind enough to add for me, there are many credible indicators of a console Diablo 3.

Diablo is a rogue-like. A bit dumbed-down, but the best graphics of any of the them at the time. D2's addition that not every creature moves at exactly rthe same speed was actually pretty novel in the world of rogue-likes.

And if you scratch the surface, there is a lot of depth there - it just doesn't start to get interesting until nightmare difficulty, by which time I'm already bored with it.

up - jumpdown - duckleft - move leftright - move rightA - shoot current object (e.g., throw a turtle at a demon)B - strike (punch a demon, or break a brick in front of you. if hit at same time jumping, breaks a brick above you)

Look no further than the sad evolution of TES. Back when TES4 came out the Bethesda said they had to dial back the graphics so it would run properly on an XBOX. So no distinct shadows, no huge preloaded areas (E.g.: open cities) even though the PC hardware could handle it without choking, they really didn't give a rat's ass about how much PC hardware could handle. Then enters TES5 and it's like the consolization of this game has grown by orders of magnitude. Now you can't change the default WASD keys fo

This could be a case where there is Diablo 3, for the PC, Diablo: Return to Sanctuary for Xbox360, Diablo 2:Cow Wars for PS3, and Nintendogs: Duriel Edition for the 3DS, and Horadric Cube Simulator for the Wii.

Bashiokâ(TM)s response on Twitter was intended as a confirmation that weâ(TM)re actively exploring the possibility of developing a console version of Diablo III, as weâ(TM)ve mentioned in the past. This is not a confirmation that Diablo III is coming to any console platform. Our focus right now is on finishing the PC/Mac version of Diablo III and making sure itâ(TM)s a worthwhile successor to the Diablo series.

I played it on and off for years; it was fun when it was somewhat challenging, but the story was always pretty weak. The world was well constructed, but particularly after BC came out everything really felt like it was just blatantly ripping off other sources for what passed as "story."

I'm a huge fan of Warcraft and Starcraft. WoW was, indeed, pretty weak. But then, I'm one of those people who can enjoy something and still recognize the flaws.

I don't think its so much of an argument as to whether or not Pandaren were made up on the spot or not but more of an argument about whether that's the best Blizzard has to offer the franchise at this point. The last expansion was rehashing an old raid boss. Before that it was tieing off the ends of an old story arc. Now it seems they're forced to provide content that seems silly by the outside spectators and not those completely engrossed in the lore. I quit WoW shortly after the Lich King became an actual raid boss and I look at what content they've added and feel its become rather silly.

Blizzard would be better off at this point to cut ties to WoW and help people transition to a new MMO with fresh start instead of attempting patches to WoW to make it flow better and *seem* original.

In many ways, the pandas were Samwise's pet easter egg. However, he was one of the lead graphics artists responsible with creating a LOT of the Warcraft concept art, and was very influential. Nearly every Warcraft nerd (which is not the same as all the players), when WoW first came out, knew of the Pandaren, and I recall people speculating and hoping that the first expansion (which brought us Draenei and Blood Elves) would give us Pandaren. Many people wanted to play a Brewmaster, even though they had only a faint idea of what that meant.

The pandaren started as a creation of lead artist Samwise Didier and an April Fool's joke, but they got a massive response from Warcraft fans.[4] When the expansion to Warcraft III was announced, the Pandaren Brewmaster was added as a neutral hero, available and playable on nearly every melee map. One Brewmaster, Chen Stormstout was included as an optional playable hero in the expansion's orc campaign. Due to this popularity, pandaren were rumored to be the new playable Alliance race to be introduced in the Burning Crusade expansion

The Burning Crusade expansion was released in 2007, a year before Kung Fu Panda, and a significant section of the population had a pretty good idea of who the Pandaren were, even then -- despite them starting as a "joke". Moreover, the World of Warcraft tabletop RPG has had the Pandaren race since 2003. Even at that time, elements of eastern philosophy and martial arts were intimately tied to the Pandaren cultural concept.

I think it's safe to say that the Pandaren were well developed before Kung Fu Panda, even if they were not a playable race in the MMO yet. I'm sure that the success of the movie made it an easier decision to make them the next playable race, but they were certainly not designed in some copycat attempt.

In fairness to WoW (which I haven't played since 2007), they had the "Kung Fu Pandas" in WC3, back in 2002, long before the movie even started development. It's not like the idea of taking an iconic Chinese animal and having them fight in an iconic Chinese style is particularly innovative.

Actually I'd say the bigger news would be how nasty are they gonna make the DRM. If they give it some nasty always on DRM that makes you jump through hoops i have a feeling it'll be pirated more than Spore.

Why can't these companies just see the traincars filled with cash that Valve is making and jump on board? Gabe had it right when he said to the effect "Pirates are the competition offering a better product" and he has shown you follow the three simple rules, make it cheap, easy, and convenient and you can

I guess we won't be seeing you in Sanctuary then, because D3 requires an always on net connection. This has been debated here and other forums previously. This move is primarily (according to Bliz) to stop the hacking and loot dupping that was rife in D2. Your character data will be stored server side, as will all loot information.

WRT to the summary comment about the PC game being a console port - you do realise it's been in Public Beta for PC and Mac for months?

While I may not agree with your wording, I do agree with your sentiment to a degree.

I loved Beyond Good & Evil. It was, in my opinion, probably the last good game that Ubisoft put out. A cult classic in every sense of the word.

I noticed that there was a PC version and it was on sale on Steam for $5. I bought it right away... but I also regretted the purchase to a degree. The ability to change the controls was very, very limited. You outright couldn't unbind certain actions or movement axises. I ended up

Don't forget the in game auction house, the lack of a real singleplayer game and that like SC2 there will be no LAN play option. I remember them rationalizing taking away the offline play as not requiring people to start over if they began a character offline.

Personally, I'm glad that they didn't have anything better to do like making sure that the game is actually better than its predecessor so that they could tell players how to play. Personally, I'm glad I didn't waste my money on SC2, I'm guessing that I'll feel the same way about Diablo 3.

Blizzard, what happened to you? You used to make such good games, but ever since WoW you can't seem to create a game that's worth paying for. Last good game you made was WC3 and that was nearly a decade ago.

There is a single-player game in exactly the same format as Diablo 2. That is, the single player and multiplayer are the same game, but with multiplayer the difficulty is increased with each additional player. I guess it's a matter of perspective, the fact that there isn't a separate game for single-player and multiplayer, as in SC2. But with an RTS, the multiplayer component always focuses on player v player battles whereas the single player focuses on story missions - eg, the entirety of the Command and Conquer series, Dune 2000, the Red Alert series, Total Annihilation, Supreme Commander 1 & 2, Warcraft 1, 2 & 3, etc - in all of these games, there's no multiplayer "story", it's just battles.

Conversely, I can't think of a SP/MP RPG where the multiplayer isn't simply the single-player game with increased difficulty. Occasionally they add some multiplayer specific components, such as arenas, but what you're describing - "lack of a real single player game" is at best misleading. If anything, there's a lack of a separate multiplayer game, but as pointed out, this is the norm for the genre. Torchlight 2 multiplayer is going to be Torchlight 2 singleplayer + more difficulty. It's rare (I can't think of a single example, really) where an RPG developer has produced an entirely separate storyline for SP and MP.

I'm 48 and was publishing games before you were born (a presumption to be sure, but no worse than yours), but OK, I understand you're extremely angry about.. something. Blizzard I think. But no need to redirect your anger inapproriately.

As far as my reply to OP goes, he may have been intending to say that there's no offline solo play in Diablo 3 (btw, this isn't necessarily true - although certainly if present it would require periodic reconnection as the offline mode in Starcraft 2 does), but that ISN'T WH

Rose colored glasses don't explain why SC2 was so ho hum and generally meh. Considering how much time Blizzard took in creating the game, the least they could have done was spend some time to make the single player campaign worth playing. Well that and implement proper LAN play and head to head modes.

The single player campaign for SC2 was crap - clearly an afterthought. Since that's the only part of the game I care about, I was extremely disappointed, and I'll wait to buy D3 untrill I hear good reviews from those I trust. That's a real change for Blizzard.

I'm going to preface my reply by saying that I am a huge fan of Diablo 2. I didn't like Diablo 1 all that much (a classic to be sure, but a little too slow and clunky for me). I've put thousands of hours into Diablo 2 (a small portion of which is represented on my Xfire profile [xfire.com]. I know the game inside and out. That said, while I was excited about Diablo 3, a lot of the stuff that has been happening has caused my interest to gradually wane.

Don't forget the in game auction house

Something I can understand. There are going to be items sold for D3 whether or not this exists. Any solution that *would* stop people from selling items will end up costing money as it would have to be either a very developed technology, involve a lot of people, or both. It's against the ToS of every nearly online game out there to sell items, accounts, etc. and yet you can readily buy them for all of those games.

This way, Blizz makes some money and everyone's generally happy. Hell, there are people who are talking about the potential of making a livable income off of said auction house. How possible or not this will be can only be discovered once it's actually out and has been subjected to the usual balancing, but it may be a likelyhood to put in 40 hours a week and make minimum wage or something close enough...

Moreover, occasionally people are hard up for cash and need to get rid of assets. In the digital age, a Level 80 WoW character with maxed out crafting and the best of the best epic gear is an asset in every sense of the word - yet we cannot legally sell them due to the ToS. If a similar case came up on D3, at least someone would be able to clear out a whole bunch of the items they've been saving for one reason or another and put some money in their pocket.

the lack of a real singleplayer game

Diablo 2 was fun single player, but I honestly always had more fun running it in groups. The lack of offline single player is, as far as I am concerned, the lack of a single player game though. I agree with you here.

and that like SC2 there will be no LAN play option.

This bugs me to no end, and for more reasons than you may think.

Starcraft 2 came out. I tried it on a weekend while hanging out with a friend at a LAN party weekend at his house. I loved it.

But I didn't buy it.

The lack of LAN play is a deal breaker for me. If it turns out that I really, really want Diablo 3, I may buy a legitimate version and run the superior pirate version in a sandbox so I can have LAN play. In the digital age, there are people who are just as skilled as the people working for companies like Blizzard working to give the fanbase what they want. If the players want LAN play, they'll have it - just like they have it with Starcraft 2, just like they have it with games like Minecraft that don't really have an official LAN play system (via Hamachi), and just like they absolutely will with Diablo 3. It's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when.

I remember them rationalizing taking away the offline play as not requiring people to start over if they began a character offline.

Of course. This is marketing 101. "We're not taking something away, it's actually a bonus feature!"

Personally, I'm glad that they didn't have anything better to do like making sure that the game is actually better than its predecessor so that they could tell players how to play. Personally, I'm glad I didn't waste my money on SC2, I'm guessing that I'll feel the same way about Diablo 3.

I fear that I may feel the same way about Diablo 3. I have basically zero interest in buying Starcraft 2 until the full three games are out in a battle chest, and even then I might just not buy it. There's nothing so awesome in Starcraft 2 that I would be willing to put up with the garbage that comes along with

You're assuming the probability of infrastructure failure on their end is higher than the probability of something going wrong with local LAN server software and infrastructure.

And remember, they're the ones writing the LAN server software. They are the ones who have the biggest LAN party of all, which is the development team in the office. I'm working on a project where we have LAN support, and have for 10 years. It's still easier and more reliable for us to use the steam matchmaking service (since our

You're assuming that Blizzard will eventually release server software or something similar once the game has run its lucrative course. This is Activision we're talking about, not Blizzard. Please let's be serious here.

Yes, and you get basically no benefit from doing it. Part of the point of LAN parties is that you get to game with little to no latency and put people on a level playing field. Which you can still somewhat do with the current system, but you add extra lag so that Blizzard can be sure that you're not pirating the game.

As for buying it, what was so brilliant about spawning was that you could actually spend time playing competitively with friends before having to commit to the purchase. The spawned copies were

Lack of LAN IS a gameplay flaw. LANs create an immersion environment that cant be replicated any other way.

You can all sit in the same room, on the same network, and play Starcraft 2.

You can just play with each other, you can play lan games.

The only real complaint I'm seeing here is "It's not easy to download copies for all our friends and play together without buying the game"

[...]

Other than that, you can 100% recreate the experience, as long as you have internet access.

And that's where the trouble starts.

Some of my favourite LAN parties in the last decade or so were done in places without direct internet access.- My parent's garage: Adjacent to the house, but no cabling there, 15-20m to the DSL modem and my parents would've killed me if I had to prop open a door for a LAN cable letting flies and mosquitoes into the house all night.- My cousin's garage: 10-20m away from the house and on the opposite side to the location of their DSL modem inside the house.- A mate's backyard party hut (complete with wet bar and pool table): 50+m from the house and any internet access.- A mate's deceased grandmother's vacant house: No phone or internet at all.A WiFi bridge can be dodgy (access points behind multiple walls) and cell phone reception is spotty at best at either of those places which rules out phone tethering and I don't know how well it would work either way, setting up NAT behind a tethered phone that is already behind the service provider's NAT or god forbid, the game wanting to download a patch over a volume limited phone contract with probably mediocre speed.

Lastly, even if you have a place where you have no problems accessing your ordinary internet connection, ISP outages can happen, especially if you live in a rural area where phone cables aren't run underground (takes only one tree falling over during a storm or one drunk driver hitting a phone pole) or one construction worker to accidentally the whole cable if it is underground.

I'll take my classic LAN mode and offline single player every day and games that are not MMO but force you to be logged in/online even for single player or LAN play can fuck right off again and will not see a dime from me.

I'll probably try the demo at some point and I'll probably play the free to play option if Blizzard provides one, but I doubt it will stay installed for more than a few hours. At least SC2 didn't, and I took the unusual step of deleting the files. I don't normally do that with large install files as I often times reinstall later, but SC2 went straight in the trash upon uninstall.

But the company (THQ) learned from the blowback from SR2. They took extra care with Saints Row the Third, and it's a terrific PC game. All the menus, combat, and movement are optimized for the PC and function intuitively and smooth as glass.

Games built for consoles don't have to suck on PCs. THQ has proven this. Blizzard is known for the polish they apply to their games, so I trust they'll take extra care in making the PC version great. It's the management decisions for D3 that I fear. (No LAN, no off

I would except that Blizzard has pretty much admitted to fucking things up, i haven't been interested in Diablo 3 in quite a while because of all the "features" they've put in to prevent people from playing in unapproved ways. Any hope of me buying it evaporated the moment that I found out that there would be no singleplayer game and that there would be no LAN play either.

There are enough potentially cool games that we can afford to be picky. I'm not missing out on anything by not buying Diablo 3. Any time I would have spent with Diablo 3 will be spent with another potentially cool game, and I'll have just as much fun.

I think they dropped the REALID registration, or at least when I signed up for b.net they didn't make me give it up. At least I don't think they did, they didn't require me to use my REALID in any publicly viewable place.

I believe they're adding a nickname system for replacement of the whole RealID thing for gamer friends that you don't know IRL. I think they called it BattleTag, read the preview a little while ago but here's what I remember:

Essentially:
battle.net account - account all your games are tied to, login for WoW, SCII, D3 etc.
RealID - aimed at people you know, handles cross comms between games - you add them once and then you see/can chat with them in other games, lets you see friends of friends too.
Battle

Not that it really affects me as I'll just crack the games I've bought from them if they force it retroactively on me, but I definitely won't be giving them more information than they currently have and I definitely won't be buying any more games from them if they're going to insist upon this sort of silliness.

I thought that they had given up on REALID, sounds unfortunate that I was wrong. This is just like that article from yesterday where Moglen took a reporter to task for using social networking sites. E

There are still the usual health potions (in current Beta form) in addition to the "bulbs" or "globes". However, stocked potions do have an actual cooldown rather than instant in prior Diablo titles. In D1 & D2 it was pretty much possible to just spam potions to live. D2 made this a little harder with the way potions actually gradually filled the globe, but the purple potions were always instant.